In spite of growing sophistication around social networking functions, complex content management underpinnings and a boat load of partners, a recent survey conducted by AIIM [1] and Information Architected [2] found that an astounding 47 percent of users still use SharePoint primarily as a file share. This means that many SharePoint users are failing to take advantage of large swatches of functionality.

In our One on One interview last week with Arpan Shah [3], director of the SharePoint product management team, he indicated that there was far more under the hood than a basic file sharing system:

"SharePoint provides a rich ECM platform and applications to help customers solve their information management and compliance business problems. SharePoint spans rich document management, records management, business process management and web content management in a seamless way to allow all users in an organization to manage and share their content reliably and securely."

The survey was conducted last November and sent out to 2000 AIIM members, of which 616 responded. The survey found that there was broad use of SharePoint with many organizations deploying multiple SharePoint sites within an organization. In fact, 24 percent deployed between 10 and 50 sites and 14 percent between 100 and 500.

It's certainly hard to believe that so many respondents are using SharePoint in such a simple way. I wonder if they are using many of the more sophisticated functions Shah alluded to in his answer without knowing it. The survey also found that few respondents used it for business process management or records management, which means either they are and don't know it or Microsoft needs to do a better job of educating its customers about the range of functionality that's available. 

The survey reported that 47 percent of respondents believed that implementation costs were more than expected. So on one hand, people feel like it's more costly than they expected, yet they don't seem to be using the system to its full potential. As Barb Mosher writes in CMS Wire, which first reported on this survey, "If Microsoft can sell over a million copies, only to have most use it as a document repository with some collaboration, think how many they could sell if organizations saw its value as a true "platform." That is a multi-million dollar question.

For more information:
- get the full report [4]
- read the CMS Wire [5] article

Related Articles:
One on One with Arpan Shah of Microsoft SharePoint [6]
Microsoft packages FAST search with SharePoint [7]
Alfresco integrates SharePoint capability in new release [8]
Pay attention to SharePoint electronic forms services [9]